Within the field of computing, many scenarios involve a visual presentation of elements, such as thumbnail images of an image gallery, or the icons and controls comprising a graphical user interface. Such presentations may be generated and displayed on a display component of a device, either directly (e.g., where the display component is accessible to the device, the device may generate a bitmap that is blitted onto the display component by a hardware component) or indirectly (e.g., the display component may be attached to a client device, and a webserver may generate and send to the client device a web page, comprising a set of elements embedded in a web document, which the client device may render within the web browser). Users may also interact with the presentations in different ways; e.g., a presentation on a workstation computer may involve interaction with a pointing device such as a mouse or trackball, while a mobile device may involve a touch-sensitive display that enables touch input from a fingertip or stylus.
A particular characteristic of display components that may affect presentations rendered thereupon is the pixel density of the display component, such as a pixels-per-centimeter measurement. It may be appreciated that such characteristics may be independent of the size of the display component (e.g., two display components of the same size may present different pixel densities; conversely, two display components of different sizes may present the same pixel density) and/or the pixel dimensions of the display component (e.g., two display components displaying a presentation with a particular pixel dimensions may do so with different physical sizes). However, the variable pixel densities of different display components may produce some difficulties in the rendering of a presentation on the display components. In particular, applications and application platforms (including the operating system of a device) are often cognizant of the pixel dimensions of the display component, and may take the pixel dimensions into account while preparing a presentation (e.g., web browsers are often configured to adjust the layout of the web page based on the pixel width of the web browser, e.g., by scaling the horizontal pixel widths of relatively sized elements in proportion with the pixel width of the web browser). However, such applications and application platforms less frequently adapt the presentation in view of the pixel density of the display component. Thus, two devices having display components with different horizontal pixel dimensions may adapt the presentation in view of the different pixel counts, but may fail to adapt the presentation in view of different pixel densities of the display components. The elements presented on such displays may therefore have equal pixel widths, but different presented widths in terms of the visual sizes of the elements visualized on the display components. Indeed, in many such devices, the display components may not be configured to report a pixel density; the device may therefore be unable to determine the pixel density of the display components and/or to adjust the presentation to depict elements of a particular apparent size.